Lost executive producer looks back at the series finale

Carlton Cuse reopens the debate about the finale of Lost, as he discusses why he and Damon Lindelof went the way they did...

Spoilers for the Lost ending lie ahead.

Many years after it aired, the debate continues to rage about the final episode of Lost. And chatting to Entertainment Weekly, the man who co-wrote The End - Carlton Cuse - has been chatting about that last episode.

Cuse penned it with Damon Lindelof, his co-showrunner on Lost, and he affirms that the ending was actually planned from the start. "There was this grand plan that we had - the idea that the show would start with Jack’s eye opening and it would end with Jack’s eyes closing, which meant that Jack had to die", Cuse said. "That was right in the DNA from the very beginning, he added. "The finale is like a hedge. You plant it, but then over time it grows bigger and thicker, and as we went down the stream with the show, we kept getting additional ideas. While some of the basic ideas remained from early on, it was made much richer just by going through the creative process of making the 119 episodes that preceded it".

EW then pressed the point about the discussions in the writers' room leading up to the penning of the finale. And Cuse said that "we felt like a spiritual resolution was the thing that would ultimately be the most emotionally satisfying. We felt like there was no possible way to answer questions. We actually attempted on a number of occasions to shoehorn in things like who’s in the outrigger, and we found ourselves doing all these sorts of narrative backflips. To put something into a story that really didn’t belong in the story that we were telling".

Cuse also argued that "I feel like we did wrap up a lot of the biggest mysteries on the show. There was no way to sustain a mystery show for 121 episodes of television and tie up every loose end. It was just not possible".

The last season of Lost, as we've argued lots of times before, is excellent, and one of the show's strongest. The last episode, however, remains a quandry. Some love it, some really don't like it at all. Most of us here still feel that after sitting through over 100 episodes to get there, the ending was a heavy let down. But we know that many think differently. It's worth reading the full EW piece to get Cuse's take on it...